The Crippled Tree by Han Suyin (6)

[CHUNG Yoon-Ngan <chungyn@mozart.collective.com.au>]

     The Crippled Tree by Han Suyin (6) 
 
    This is an excerpt from the book "The Crippled Tree" 
    by Han Suyin, a Hakka medical doctor-cum-author. 
 
 
    ........................From Saigon the boat, now full, with many
Frenchmen in first class, Annamites and Tonkinese merchant and Chinese
students in second class, developed some engine defects so that it went
limping into Singapore harbour, which Yentung (Han Suyin's father on his
way to Europe to study) found to his surprise was yet another Chinese
city, though run by the English. "We are being entertained by the local
merchants' guilds. Some of the merchants here are extremely prosperous." 
Here Sun Yatsen's influence was not as great as in Indo-China, though
later Singapore was to become one of his financial mainstays for the
Revolution in China, and by 1910 he was reckoned to have ten thousand
supporters there. 
 
  The feelings of resentment against the Manchu dynasty were outspoken in
Singapore. Already in 1898, Yentung learned, there had been much agitation
to cut the queue, and this had not abated. Most of the Chinese here had
arrived as "pigs", or indentured labour. There was also a minority of
political exiles. In Singapore the British ruled and the Chinese worked.
The British Empire needed more industrious, hard-working "human pigs" to
go into Malaya and worked there as well, for the Federated States of
Malaya had now been opened to British conquest. 
 
   The first nation kipnapping Chinese for use on their vessels were the
Portuguese, who made raids upon the coast all through the seas from India
to China. The Dutch, needing labour for the East Indies (present day
Indonesia), first organized the Chinese "pig" system of contract labour.
The Manchu dynasty did not allow anyone to leave the country on pain of
death; however, the poverty, the constant revolts and their suppression,
led to a fund of human pigs, men ready and willing to leave, especially
after the Taiping. In 1860, by treaty, the Powers forced the dynasty to
allow Chinese to leave their own land, which enormously faciliated the
trade in "pigs". The price paid to the recruiter was forty silver dollars:
ten dollars was given to the labour recruited, thirty paid for his
transport. His sale for labour in the Dutch East Indies brought the 
contractor there one hundred dollars. The man signed a "contract" (which
he often could not read) with his thumb mark, stating that he would work
for three years for the sum of one hundred and eighty dollars, or sixty
dollars per year. To redeem himself at the end of three years he would
have to repay one hundred dollars to the plantation master. He was
dependent for food on a canteen run by his employers, where prices were
high. He could not leave the plantations. Opium dens were kept on the
plantations, and there he spent more money. As a result he soon owed much
more than a hundred dollars, and at the end of three years would sign
another three years' contract. The system followed in Malaya by the
British was along the same lines, and by 1900s the pig-runners were
British and Portuguese merchants, but the people who did the press-ganging
for them were Chinese gangsters in Shanghai, Canton, and other ports. 
 
  Yentung found that Kang Yuwei had staunch supporters in Singapore,
chiefly among the more respectable and prosperous. But Sun Yatsen, though
controversial, held the imagination of the many. The fortune-tellers of
the Monkey shrines in Singapore and Penang predicted victory for Sun
Yatsen; they told how in 1894 Sun, with eighteen other men, had formed an
Association, seventeen had been captured and beheaded, leaving only Sun to
carry on, to make the Revolution....This showed that Heaven was on his
side.  He had been captured in London, but again Heaven had intervened to
save him, in the person of an Englishman Dr Cantile.............
 
  All this Yentung learned from Chia, a Hakka merchant, who received and
feasted the students in his residence in Kling Street, Singapore. Chia was
a public-spirited man, the owner of some wealth in pineapples. His father
had fled at the end of the Taiping; his mother had fought in the Taiping
women regiments, and been killed; an uncle of his owed pepper plantations
in Borneo. Chia gave money to Sun Yatsen's cause. 
 
  Once again Yentung was perplexed. The British, whom he had learnt to
hate in Szechuan because they openly wanted the whole of the Great River
basin, were here the protectors of the Chinese; under their rule the
Chinese in Singapore prospered and made money, and praised the British. 
...................................................................... 
 
  
  From "THE CRIPPLED TREE" 
  by Han Suyin